Last minute preparations
The wineries have been ramping up the work again over the last couple of weeks. The teams of harvesters are being put in place, and are now eagerly awaiting the starting orders. The harvest will generally last between 10 and 20 days according to the size of the winery, the weather, and how the grapes are harvested. Harvesting by hand takes considerably longer than by machine.
The cellars and fermentation halls, or chais, have been cleaned and tidied to be ready for the new harvest. Many of the wineries have also been busy bottling previous vintages to free up space in the vats for the first fermentation of the new wine to come.
Our partner winemakers are now prowling the vineyards each day, observing and tasting the grapes to see how ripe they are. They also scrutinise the weather reports and combine these with their estimations of when the grapes will reach optimum maturity to try and predict a date to start the harvest.
The harvest dates differ from region to region
This year we are in a more usual cycle, and the first of our partner wineries to pick their grapes are Domaine Allegria and Domaine la Cabotte in the Languedoc and Côtes du Rhône wine regions, where the high summer temperatures and long hours of sunshine allow the grapes to mature faster.
The wineries a little further north will then follow with our two Burgundy partners, Domaine Chapelle in Santenay, and Domaine Jean-Marc Brocard in Chablis, hosting Harvest Experience Days the last weekend of September and the first weekend of October. Château Beau Rivage in Bordeaux, Domaine Stentz-Buecher in Alsace and Château de la Bonnelière in the Loire Valley will then finish the round of Harvest Experience Days during the following two weekends.
Generally speaking, spring was cool and wet, but the beginning of summer was very warm, so the ripeness of the grapes is neither late nor early. We'll be keeping our fingers crossed for good weather right until the very last grapes have been picked! It's been a difficult year for some with hail storms, flooding, and some very hot spells in some regions, so it would be nice to avoid any further climatic challenges. And a little sun is always appreciated to welcome our adoptive vine parents to the Harvest Experience Days!
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